The new semester began yesterday and it already feels like it has been months. I spent those two days struggling to get some actual work done – I succeeded for about 3 hours, which is not so bad. I remember not being able to cope with the distribution of my work time between administrative tasks, meetings, applications, teaching (minimal as I only teach one class) and research (research itself being divided again in archive work, reading, encoding, writing, editing) not a year ago. The disillusion as to what I can hope from my work days has at least achieved that I see...

Sabine has been working too much on copyediting and layouting her Boeckh volume (heading to the press by the end of the week by the way). While we were sitting next to each other at the workshop “More persons – more data – more repositories” at the Academy of Sciences this morning, she pointed out to me a typo on the workshop flyer. The paragraph describing the workshop contained not the real title (“more persons – more data – more repositories”), but an obviously wrong one: “more persons – more data – more persons”. I don’t think it is a...

When I come back home after an evening out, I eventually end up on the platform of the Subway Nb 9 at the Zoo. Between 10 and 11 P.M., I always expect people to be as half asleep as I am, but there usually is so much activity that you might think it is 5 P.M. So I head to the front of the platform and check the tracks for mice. In the summer, there usually are 3 or 4 dancing around. I only saw one yesterday evening, one lonely mouse carefully checking each and every bit of the track....

I will finish writing my mid-term report for the German Research Foundation this afternoon. This and the presentation of last Monday lead me to formulate more clearly our achievements and our goals. The good thing is: I was not overwhelmed and depressed by the to-do list when I saw what the already-done list of the last 2 years contains. I spent last winter and spring running from a meeting to another, trying to figure out how to organize cooperations with different institutions in order to present an edition that does not pretend to re-invent things that already do exist. I...

The Berlin Academy of Sciences just launched a digital edition of the minutes of the work sessions that were held there between 1746 and 1786. You can consult it here: it is awesome. Not just because it looks awesome (great design, intuitive orientation, no information overload), but also because it is an actually well conceived resource – and a totally helpful one for my further work too. The originals are in French (French became the official language at the Academy under Frederick 2nd and remained it until 1810), but you can find a selection of German translations. You can search...